2012 SXSW Interactive panels worth your vote
It’s open voting season again for proposed panels for next year’s SXSW Interactive festival! The SXSW PanelPicker 2012 includes more than 3,200 panels to choose from! You could try reading them all yourself, but you’d probably have to forfeit your entire weekend in the process!
To make things easier, we’re rolling out a series of posts over the next several days that highlights the top 100 70 or so proposals we think are most worthy of your attention, votes, and comments.
In this initial post, we’re sharing our favorites from four categories: 1) Health / Future of Medicine, 2) Branding / Marketing /Advertising, 3) Social Media / Social Networks, and 4) Greater Good / Charity / Nonprofit categories. We’re also including summaries of own two submissions — a presentation from Valerie Sprague about online identity, and my panel on Facebook customer service by brands.
According to SXSW, public voting accounts for 30% of the final decision on which panels are ultimately chosen, so your input does matter! Voting remains open until 11:59pm CDT on Friday, September 2, 2011.
LiveWorld panels
1) The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands
“Managing customer service on a Facebook Page is a messy proposition, particularly for large businesses and brands. Increasingly impatient customers and fans are flocking to the Facebook Wall to …”
- Bryan Person, Social Media Evangelist at LiveWorld
Confirmed panelists: David Berkowitz ‐ @DBerkowitz, Senior Director of Emerging Media & Innovation, 360i; Molly DeMaagd ‐ @MollyD1, Customer Care Social Media Director, AT&T; Eric Ludwig ‐ @TheSEMninja, Sr. Director of Online Marketing at Rosetta Stone.
2) Handles, Vandals, and Online Scandals
“Social networks want to be the place where everybody knows your name, and the big ones require users to state their legal one, first and last. But is “authenticity” really about using the name your parents gave you everywhere online, or …”
- Valerie Sprague, Senior Community Programs Manager at LiveWorld.
Health / Future of Medicine
3) Spoonful of Sugar: A Digital Strategy
“While they might not have realized it in 1964, the Mary Poppins tune “Spoonful of Sugar” is the ideal interactive media strategy. You’ve probably been searching for the right combination of content and personality to make your healthcare interactive media …”
- Kristin Thompson – Franklin Street
4) Friending Pharma: Patients, Industry & New Media
“As more and more patients begin using social media as an information source and a support network, it’s inevitable that they’ll begin to interact with representatives of pharmaceutical companies looking to use new technologies to inform and educate….”
- Brian Reid – WCG
5) Irreconcilable Differences: Pharma & Social Media
“The pharmaceutical industry has struggled for years to find its way in the world of social media. While many initiatives have been attempted, they have mostly been in the shallow end of the digital networking pool …”
- Steve Woodruff – Impactiviti
6) Designing Effective Online Physician Communities
“The emergence of online communities dedicated to physician collaboration is the result of a need for new tools, mindsets and relationships. Yet physicians present one of the most challenging populations to mobilize around change in the practice of medicine….”
- Kenn Louis and panel from Within3
Branding / Marketing / Advertising
7) Community & Influence: How to not piss people off
“Marketing is social. We’re all sold. But how do you maximize your return in social without appearing like a douchebag? One the one hand, top influencers in the social space are the one …”
- Megan Berry – Klout, and panel
Just ‘Cus It’s an Infographic Doesn’t Make It True
“Data has … risen as a means to generate buzz & awareness, and none has been more buzz-worthy than the almighty infographic. But with the rise of flashy data, the old adage rings true – ‘Don’t believe everything you read.’ …”
- Gray Blue – FanBridge, and panel
9) Feeding the Social Media Content Machine
“In today’s social media environment it’s the brands that spark that draw engagement. What’s harder is sparking in such a way that’s authentic to who you are – generating retweets, replies or forwards around purpose…”
- Britton Upham – McGarrah Jessee
10) Unleashing Advertising’s Age of Engagement
“Technology, creative, media, communications, public relations, and product development have evolved to become parts of one another, yet advertising agencies and the companies that hire them remain siloed and organizationally unable to move as fast as they should….”
- Ian Schafer – Deep Focus
11) Using You Tube Channels to Tell Your Brand Story
“This presentation will cover the essentials in how to tell your brand story and reach your audience through various forms of YouTube Channels….As brands continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible and engage their audiences in completely new ways, choices for marketers on how to leverage YouTube Channels and video content abound….”
- Karen OBrien – Crimson Consulting
12) Customer Service and Web 3.0 at Business Scale
“As social technology moves beyond marketing and into core business disciplines the challenges of the social web (Web 2.0) give way to those of the semantic web (Web 3.0)….Making the challenge even harder, operating in the rapidly evolving area of customer service a mainstream brand may have to receive, prioritize and responds to thousands of posts every day….”
- Dave Evans – Social Dynamx
13) Facebook Stole My Site Traffic: How To Get It Back
“Like other brands in 2010, you jumped on the social media wagon with a Facebook page, gathered Fans with the usual promotional tactics, and waited for them to fall in love with everything you shared. Your Fans Like you, but they aren’t going to your site any longer….”
- Gina Rau – Janrain
14) How To Offer Customer Service That Doesn’t Suck
“Do you know anyone who enjoys speaking to an automated teller for customer service? If your customers are real people, then your customer service should be, too. Today’s modern consumers expect 24/7 service and the ability …”
- Kristin Smaby – Simple Finance Tech Corp (BankSimple)
15) Brands Need 3rd-Party Tools to Succeed on Facebook
“Facebook changes fast. The site’s functionality and interface are in constant flux, there are always new marketing strategies emerging, and the technology to execute marketing campaigns takes a long time to develop in house. Can brands succeed at Facebook marketing on their own?…”
- Josh Constine – Inside Facebook, and panel
Social Media / Social Networks
16) EdgeRank, Metrics & News Feed Optimization, Oh my!
“How do brands succeed on Facebook? It’s not magic that some brands’ Wall posts get visibility in the Facebook News Feed and others don’t. Every Wall post published by a brand competes with the Wwall posts of an average Facebook user’s 130 friends and 90+ Liked pages….”
- Helen Todd – Sociality Squared, and panel
17) Google+ Business: Plus, Minus or Something Else?
“Google+ and business will have only been together for a couple months. Is it an engagement, a wedding or a divorce? A look at the opportunities of Google+ for Business, as well as early initiatives that have been a success or failure. Is this just another social network?”
- Richard Binhammer – Dell, and panel
18) A Culture of Yes
“All too often, highly regulated industries like healthcare, finance, insurance and others, feel as though their hands are tied when it comes to certain marketing tactics…. But while the majority sits firmly on the sidelines, a smart minority have ventured forward and found success engaging in social media. How have they done it?…”
- Carissa Caramanis O’Brien – Red Box Communications
19) Lessons from a Decade of Community Management
“In this session, I will riff on the past 10 years [of community management experience] and share some of the most important, enduring lessons that I have learned from being directly involved in the day-to-day management of these online communities…”
- Patrick O’Keefe – iFroggy Network
20) Do You Really Like Me? Acquire True Facebook Fans
“To ‘Like’ or not to ‘Like’ is a proposition we are faced with every day on Facebook. As a consumer, you ask yourself, ‘Why should I Like this brand?” and “What will I get in return for my Like?’ And as a brand, you aspire to get as many Likes as possible …”
- Jayson Merlino and panel from G2
21) Like This: Secrets of the Top Branded Fan Pages
“As marketers try to get the most out of their Facebook fan pages, they need data on how often to post, how many likes they should expect, how many comments, what percent of active fans should they strive for and much more. In this session, we’ll provide a data-driven analysis …”
- Jim Tobin – Ignite Social Media
22) The Community Revolving Door: Staying a Step Ahead
“Some say getting started is the hardest part – and it can be, but often this is a phase of excitement organizationally and time where everyone is focused on the shiny new toy. Year two, those internal stakeholders are on to the next new thing, your customers are back to their regular day jobs and you are stuck having to push that community rock up the steep hill of engagement….”
- Heather Strout – Farland Group, and panel
23) Inside Out: Internal Social Media & Big Business
“Social media has been the bright shiny object for marketers from the beginning. But, the fun doesn’t stop at the firewall. Businesses of all size are finding that the tools of social media help bring people together for collaboration and conversation inside a company …”
- Brad Mays – WCG, and panel
Greater Good / Charity / Nonprofit
24) Can growing a moustache change the world?
“Join Adam Garone, CEO/co-founder of Movember, as he discusses how Movember leveraged the support of a few daring partners and pockets of loyal fans to generate a global movement that saw 450,000 moustache growers in 2010. Learn how Movember captivated the attention of a demographic infamous for not discussing their health…”
- Adam Garone – Movember
25) Content As A Means for Social Change
“[W]hile social media has been the Internet’s buzzword for some time now, research shows that content consumption actually represents 53% of all time spent online. Given that content takes up most consumers’ time on the web, it’s time to harness it as the most effective way to drive social change in the real world.”
- Arianna Huffington and panel from Huffington Post
26) Kill the Follower Count & Embrace Your Mission
“So how do we move the social media measurement conversation away from ‘dumb’ metrics like the number of followers, beyond ‘smart’ metrics like the click-thru rate for links, and get to the heart of the matter: does social media support your goal for social good?…”
- Devon Smith and panel from Threespot
27) An Open Source Approach to Community Building
“Open source goes beyond code — it’s a philosophy founded in creating, sharing and modifying with an active community. In building our community with an open-source philosophy, we’ve found that the more an organization opens itself up, the more the potential of the community is unlocked….”
- Sean Connolly and panel from the Online News Association
